This started as a reply to Damianov at Voyages in Eternity and was quickly turning into not only a lengthy reply, but a topic changer at the end so I decided to just blog my thoughts instead to the 1 1/2 people who actually read this blog ;).

I think people when talking about death penalties in general aren’t thinking on an abstract enough level to see the whole picture.

Just to get you thinking a little bit more, take this scenerio: I’m playing a game and two people of the opposite faction, both higher levels (we’ll presume a level-based game for ease of discussion) than yourself and they quickly dispatch of you with little notice. These two gankers decide it would be a ton of fun to camp your dead body. After several deaths, you just HAPPEN to get the upperhand and defeat the only one of the two attackers who can slow your escape. You down him, but since there isn’t a ‘death penalty’ of running for 2 minutes to get back to their ‘body’, he is back up within a few seconds, slowing your escape, leading to another death.